Just weeks after acquiring mobile service quality company Actix, Amdocs has announced their intent to acquire Celcite for $129 million in cash. How does this fit in to Amdocs’ OSS strategy?
Celcite offer a number of systems in the theme of mobile network performance, configuration and optimisation. These are nuts n’ bolts processes – Good old fashioned OSS products that are used by engineers, the NoC, and planners to get the job done right.
As I noted in the post about Amdocs acquiring Actix, products for getting the techies’ job done is no longer sexy or a big revenue stream for OSS vendors. That’s why a big part of Celcite’s marketing and product development is SON – Self Optimising Networks.
SON in many ways is the SDN of the RAN, and is equally vaguely defined. In Celcite’s case they have taken a lot of the skills and processes of RAN optimization experts and distilled them in to algorithms that can make rapid, automatic configuration changes to the network.
This is what Celcite have to say about their SON solution:
- SON eliminates up to 60% of manual optimization tasks.
- Celcite SON automatically optimizes both 3G & 4G networks, doubling the cost-reduction benefit.
- 20% gain in performance and quality
- Achieve safe autonomous optimization without any human intervention
Now, replacing the techies with robots is something you can sell. Plus, because it’s self-optimizing it can increase quality and coverage and react to events in ways that manual processes cannot. Customer experience and service quality is sexy.
How does this fit in to Amdocs’ expanding OSS portfolio?
The tag-line on the Amdocs press release is certainly on-message and aligned with the other recent acquisition:
“Strategic acquisition will allow service providers to maximize network capacity and quality and use geo-located network data to improve the customer experience.”
Sentences with ‘strategy’ and ‘maximise’ and ‘quality’ rarely impart much information, but taken in the context of Amdocs’ recent approach to the market it’s a wise move. On the one hand they have Actix to monitor the mobile customer experience, and now they have Celcite and its range of solution for solving network issues affecting those customers.
Amdocs didn’t have much in their tool bag for the mobile RAN, as their big ex-Cramer OSS suite mainly focused on the fixed-line bits of the network from the cell site back to the core and transmission. This acquisition of Celcite therefore makes a lot of sense, coming after the Actix purchase, to provide an end-to-end mobile monitoring and optimization product set.
You can find the full press release here.
Amdocs have also added a short blog post, adding a few more points about the strategy.